


the tallest trees start from the smallest of seeds

by NatureGirl202



Series: silent nights and fitful sleep [1]
Category: Mass Effect, Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Earthborn Shepard, F/M, Gen, War Hero Shepard, trigger warnings for abuse (emotional/verbal) and attempted sexual assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 16:07:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10834668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NatureGirl202/pseuds/NatureGirl202
Summary: //tumblr prompt: "aaliyah shepard + youth"“The only way to survive is to keep your eyes dry and your liver shot to hell, got it?”





	the tallest trees start from the smallest of seeds

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE take note of the trigger warnings in the tags.

She gets vague images sometimes: a woman with fair skin and red hair. She’s no idea if it’s actually her mother she sees, or just her imagination. Either way, she’ll never really know. She figures as the years go by that her parents are either dead or just don’t care. There’s no way to track them down, she was dropped off at the orphanage doorstep at the ripe age of one year and eight months with nothing but a blanket and a first name and birthdate scribbled onto a sticky note.

It doesn’t matter, really. Her lack of parents only haunts her for the first ten years of her life before she decides to shrug it off. It won’t do her any good. She’s got a lot of things missing from her life and thinking about any of them won’t help her survive. What will is a community, a network of resources to learn from.

She joins the Reds at twelve and for a year, she just sort of exists. She’s in the background, hovering and not making any real connections until one day a boy approaches her with eyes like the sky and hair like the sand she’s seen in vids. He’s almost two years older and he’s got a grin that speaks of _adventure_ and it’s not long before she finds herself wrapping around him in every sense. He teaches her _risk_ and _sex_ and that intimacy has no place in a relationship. He teaches her how to give but never receive. He tells her _“this is love”_ and she doesn’t know anything to the contrary, so she believes him.

He climbs the ranks of the Reds and she remains dutifully behind him. As his connections grow, so does hers. She was right about the key to survival, her connections through the gang becoming strong enough to never go a night without some sort of meal. As the years crawl by, though, whatever shreds of a relationship she has with the boy with eyes of the sky become further frayed. He tells her that her art is pointless and will get her nowhere. He tells her that she needs to stick by him if she hopes to make it in this world. He points out every flaw of hers and tells her it’s for the sake of her own growth (but should his flaws be brought to light, they are dismissed as nonexistent or a misunderstanding on her part).

It crashes down one night when she’s four months into sixteen and he’s two days into eighteen and his hands skirting up her shirt, but she’s tired and it’s not particularly enjoyable for her and her skin’s been crawling at the thought of him touching her since he last relieved himself with her two weeks ago.

“I’m tired” she tells him, but his hand continues. “Not tonight” she says, but he’s groping at her chest now. “ _No_ ” she says more firmly, grabbing his wrist and tugging his hand away from her body. He snatches his hand back and before she knows it, he’s grabbing her waist and sliding her closer to him along the couch and she tries to squirm away, but his grip is strong and she knows she’ll have bruises. He tells her she owes him and it’s not a big deal and that he just needs to get off, which is all his focus has ever been on when having sex. Still, she persists and he becomes increasingly frustrated as he tries to hold her still and take her pants off at the same time. She yells, but no one comes, even though she knows there are other Reds in the next room.

Her leg manages to slip free and she thinks it’s truly a miracle as she knees him right between the legs. He sputters in pain and falls off the couch. He calls after her, but she’s already fleeing the room. Her breath is coming out in gasps and tears are streaming down her cheeks, but the looks she gets from those in the room are mildly curious at best. She tilts her chin up high, holds her breath, and exits the building into the cool night air.

She sits on the stairs and nearly chokes as she finally releases her sobs. A good five minutes go by, before she hears the door behind her open and she tries to choke down her cries. An older girl, nineteen she thinks, steps casually down the stairs. She’s been a fixture in the Reds since Aaliyah joined, always aloof, spending more time with the older members than those Aaliyah’s age.

The older girl takes out a cigarette and lights it and Aaliyah’s nose can’t help but scrunch as she’s assaulted with the scent. “That won’t do you any good, y’know.” Aaliyah’s shocked enough at the girl speaking to her to make eye contact for a brief moment, before quickly glancing away in a pointless effort to hide her tears. “The crying. No one gives a fuck about some little girl crying. All tears say is ‘I’m weak, so go ahead and take a shit on me.’” She takes a drag of her cigarette before handing down a brown bag with a bottle that smells of straight vodka and Aaliyah takes it hesitantly. “The only way to survive is to keep your eyes dry and your liver shot to hell, got it?”

She nods, but the other girl’s still watching her, waiting for something, so she lifts the bottle to her lips and takes a gulp and tries not to choke when it burns down her throat. The other girl nods approvingly, despite Aaliyah’s clear displeasure with the beverage, and turns her attention to the night sky. Aaliyah takes another chug from the bottle and she must have kept going, because she doesn’t really remember anything after that.

She decides the next morning to remain a light drinker, but she’ll get drunk like that two more times in her life, once when she’s forced to break her lifelong promise of no one left behind and again when she’s still alive despite the laws of nature and she’s been abandoned once more in her life.

She makes it clear to the boy that she no longer wants anything to do with him. After that, no one else seems to want anything to do with _her_. They accept her presence, but she’s back in the background. They hardly speak to her, hardly look at her. The new key to survival becomes _getting out_. _He_ makes quick notice of her new status of pariah, and is quick to let her know what she can do to fix that. She holds her chin up high, though, and doesn’t spit in his face. No, she does that on her eighteenth birthday with an Alliance application in her hand and one foot out the door.

* * *

Blood and dirt. That’s almost all she notices. It’s assaulting her senses. There’s a deep gash through her left eyebrow and she has to keep wiping the blood out of her eye. And if it’s not blood getting in her eye, it’s her hair. Her red locks have fallen out of their bun—quite the achievement, being that she ties it tight enough to have given her a headache for the first five months she began wearing the style.

Her sniper rifle’s shot to hell, overheated so bad it no longer works. She’s on her last grenade and her SMG has certainly seen better days. There’s an ache in her ribs too, now that she thinks about it. She must have cracked a few dodging that last explosion.

She looks to the wide eyes of the colonists, their hands shaking on the guns they hold. They’re at their last barricade. If they lose this position, they lose the whole colony. And she’s all they have. The two fellow Alliance soldiers that had accompanied her are dead and she can’t believe just two hours ago she’d thought this would be a routine colony checkup.

She’s taken out more batarian heads than she had props in target practice. She’d seen more blood and guts than she cared to think about. She’s heard more screams than she can comprehend. She exhausted and her body aches and she thinks if she stands her legs might just give out and damn, it’d probably be nice to be a biotic right now. It’s not even over yet. She can hear the rest of the batarian troops approaching, taking advantage in the reprieve from the human forces.

But the colonists are watching her and in their eyes she sees terror, yeah, but she also sees the smallest flicker of _hope_ and that makes her lungs constrict more than any pain. No one else will die, she decides then. Never on her watch. No one will be left behind, no one sacrificed. She’ll do her _damnedest_ to make sure they all get out of this alive. If she leaves anything behind, it’ll be _that_.

One hand grips the handle of her gun while the other clutches her last grenade and she rises.

 

She’s breathing. She’s covered in blood and dirt and she doesn’t have to look in the mirror to know she’s unrecognizable, but she’s breathing. And so are the colonists. That’s all she could’ve asked for. She watches as the Alliance troops bustle through the colony, taking stock of the damage and injured. Since she’d waved off medical—there are other who need it more than she does, though the logical part of her knows she should get the gash on her face looked at soon as possible—they’ve all been kind of giving her a wide berth. Their eyes when they glance toward her are full of disbelief, but she doesn’t care. Right now, she’s just taking a moment to _breathe_.

Kneecaps enter her line of vision from where she’s sitting on the ground. She looks up, at the face of an older man being framed by the sun. He sticks his hand toward her and she only hesitates slightly before taking it. He hauls her up and she can’t help but groan as her entire body protests the movement.

“So you’re the hero of the day” he says in a deep voice and she grimaces slightly at the already popular title. “Lieutenant Commander Shepard, is it?” She nods, straightening her back despite her sore muscles, taking note of the ranking on this man’s uniform. “Captain David Anderson.” He holds his hand out and she takes it, but will kick herself later for forgetting to salute.

“Pleasure to meet you, sir.”

**Author's Note:**

> Also on [tumblr](http://bxtgrl.tumblr.com/post/160361149157/aaliyah-shepard-youth). <3


End file.
